


how the story ends

by swingingparty



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Doomed Timelines, F/F, GAME OVER Timeline (Homestuck), Hurt/Comfort, Meteorstuck, light on the comfort if we're being real
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:14:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23465965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swingingparty/pseuds/swingingparty
Summary: Your name is ROSE LALONDE and you are WATCHING THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE DIE.
Relationships: Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 4
Kudos: 34





	how the story ends

**Author's Note:**

> heelo i have decided to use this account again

Your name is ROSE LALONDE and you are WATCHING THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE DIE.

It happens so fast. You’ve never considered the appropriate timeline for this—well, you have, but you’ve always managed to tell yourself that it’s just the product of general anxiety and your tendency to catastrophize—but you cannot help but think that this is far too fast. When you've imagined the end of the world, playing out scenarios over and over again in the back of your head, it always took a little longer. As if, even amidst the chaos, some powers-that-be were bending time to their liking, giving you just a little breathing room, a little space to process and absorb the collapse of everything you held dear. Perhaps little too thoughtful of them, in retrospect.

You have never imagined it like this, though: standing at the edge of one of the giant rocky outcrops, watching as she and Karkat come into view, eyes falling straight to the Gamzee-Terezi debacle you've failed monumentally at getting under control. You hear Karkat shout something, his voice rough-edged and a little shaky compared to normal, and then the two of them take off. One moment she and Karkat are sprinting down the makeshift concrete path, faces warped into twin masks of pure, unadulterated rage, making a beeline right at the psycho clown and Terezi covered in her own blood. Karkat, screaming bloody murder, overtakes her and flings himself at Gamzee, sickle raised. This happens too fast, too. For a second, he flies through the air, teeth bared, looking for all the world more terrifying than he ever has. Light catches off his sickle, bouncing into Gamzee's bloodied and scarred face. But Karkat is too slow—and if the situation were different, you would wonder if this was the lingering manifestations of the feelings Karkat once held for the clown. But it isn't different, and Karkat is stabbed twice, right through the chest both times before you can take another breath. His scream turns into a grunt that somehow echoes around the space, and you feel you stomach clench into the size of a fist as the troll falls back, face arranged into an almost comical expression of shock as he tumbles down into the lava.

And then she screams.

Like really— _screams_. You’ve never heard a noise like that come from her, not even in your worst fights, not even in the debacle at Can Town before the meteor landed. The sound of her chainsaw revving cuts through the chaos around you—the fight erupting between Aranea and Jane and Jake, Dave and whoever he’s gotten his hands on now, The Condesce—and she follows in Karkat’s footsteps, flinging herself up the cliff face.

Gamzee is still laughing, the sound maniacal and grating, as she cuts him clean in half. You watch her hit the ground, still screaming, dark purple splattered all over her face.

And it’s still happening too fast. You make a move to say something, reach out to her, grab for her, speak to her one last time because you have seen this future, lived this timeline out to its bloody close and a part of you, however small, however clamped down and ignored, knows that there is only one way this particular version of the story ends.

You’re too slow, though. It’s too fast.

The Condesce—god, the fucking Condesce—looks down from her vantage point. Though you don’t see her, you feel it happening; the air around you turns electric, the very molecules of your body starting to vibrate, each breath you take tasting like iron and oranges all of a sudden. Then the world rips open in a blast of red and blue. Terezi is knocked clean, Aranea misses it by a hair-breath. And the love of your life, Kanaya Maryam, is hit with the blast full-on. One moment she’s standing there, chainsaw abandoned, looking up as the sky tears itself open. The next there’s just—nothing.

No chainsaw. No body. No Kanaya.

Not to resort to colloquialisms, but at this point in the Game, you and death are old friends. The sort of friends you can hit up after long stretches of time in which you do not see each other, headed to a bar and knocking down shots while you trade stories that fill in the missing months to each other. Your friends, your closest friends have all died at least once, sometimes at the fault of you—as always, your mind works its way back to John and Jack Noir, the sword going right through his chest, the sheer volume of blood that had sprayed out and just kept coming—and even you yourself have died as well. This is a familiar feeling; by now it has lost its sting, rendered only less painful by the fact that everyone who you have witnessed die has come back to life.

But this is different. There is none of the muffled grief you find yourself feeling when, say, Dave and Karkat would strife too hard for too long and the fight would end with Dave doubled up, sickle buried deep in his stomach, spitting blood onto the meteor surface; he would come back only a few hours later with a new scar and an even bigger axe to grind with the loud-mouthed troll, if that was at all possible. This is so entirely different. For a second, you don't feel anything. You see Kanaya, then you don't, but your brain takes a second to process, lagging behind the rest of your sense.

You see Kanaya, then you don't, then it hits. Like a ton of bricks right to the chest, ploughing through out as if you were nothing but a wet piece of paper. You feel yourself stop, then feel your knees jerk down, buckling underneath your suddenly impossibly heavy weight. Something hot and vicious and serrated tears through you, ripping up your stomach and throat until your whole body is burning with the pain, world shifting out of focus as your eyes well up with tears, and you're still looking for Kanaya like she's going to reappear. She will laugh at you, lips quirking up into her familiar soft smile, and tell you that you need to appreciate advanced comedy when you see it. You will tell her she has been spending too much time with Dave, and the world will realign itself, start spinning properly again. But she doesn't reappear, of course.

Then, quite suddenly, everything stops mattering. You know this story. You know how it ends.

Aranea and The Condesce are doing something else now: hurling planets at each other, screaming bloody murder, trying to end the universe right here and now. It takes you a moment to realize they've only started focusing their attention on each other for lack of other things to do; the rest of your friends lay around you, dead or very much nearing that point. You catch sight of a bundle of red laying discarded on an outcrop and your vision seems to pitch sideways, brittle grief clogging up your throat until you can't breathe. Dave, too, is dead. Karkat is dead. Jane and Jake are dead. You can't see Terezi, which means she, too, must be dead. Kanaya is dead with no hope of revival; this is the punch that sends you flying, crashing into the side of the ring, slumping down to the padded gym floor, and then your metaphors disintegrate around you and Kanaya is still gone, still dead, and you just stop caring. It's like a light switch has turned off in your brain. You just do not care anymore. You don’t care.

You watch as The Condesce roars in fury again, chunks of rock and debris swirling around her like a cyclone. Suddenly, she’s not The Condesce, an all-powerful ancestor hell-bent on taking over the universe and destroying you’ve worked for so much as she’s just the troll who killed Kanaya. Nothing else about her matters aside from that.

You throw yourself at her, flying past destroyed buildings and floating chunks of rubble and balls of fire. You and your knitting needles and your incredible inability to save anyone like you’re supposed to. Her and her trident and empty eyes and her powers that can level a planet. There is only one way this is ending. It’s perhaps a good thing you don’t feel the trident sink into you. It’s perhaps a good thing that you stopped feeling anything a while ago. You find the world going black, the fire and destruction blurring at the edges; you know that you’re dying, and you don’t really care.

***

Your name is ROSE LALONDE and you SEE YOUR MOTHER when you wake up.

She’s speaking—to you, you think dully—your name intermingled with “mom” repeated, over and over again. You taste blood in your mouth, feel it bubbling in the back of your throat. Breathing is laborious; you have half a mind to ask if someone’s put cotton swabs up your nose before you remember that would be stupid and you’re dying. Your chest feels ice-cold, empty, like something essential has been removed from it, too far gone to even hurt. Small victories, then.

“Please don’t die,” your mother says, her hand gripping your forearm, nails biting into her skin. She smells like she always does—jasmine and rubbing alcohol, sharp and oddly comforting. “Rose.”

It’s not your mother, of course; your mother is dead and buried, has been for a long time. This is Roxy.

You can hear grief piling up in her voice, leaking through the cracks and hesitant pauses in her speech. Her breath is shaky; she’s going to cry. Suddenly you have to—you have to open your eyes. Just open your eyes and do something. The sky behind her is a blaze of light, something eerily akin to the Northern Lights you used to watch sometimes as a child. Roxy looks so like your mother it’s disarming; you almost forget what you’re doing, where you are, what’s happening in favor of reaching out to her, of being thirteen and naive again. Your mother was never one to fix anything that you couldn’t yourself, but you’re tired and cold and swallowing back mouthfuls of your own blood and you are just so, so scared. You want someone to hold you. You want someone else to make this right.

“What…” you try, faces swimming in and out of your view. There’s someone else behind Roxy, you realize, dark hair and cracked glasses and all blue and yellow. John. You remember another scenario between the two of you with the roles reversed, John on the floor, you above him. You can't tell if he's crying or not, and the thought makes your throat close like a vice; you have to cough to clear it. The motion sends a dizzying spasm of pain through you, white-hot, running from the base of your neck to the small of your back. “…happened to me?”

“The witch got you,” Roxy says, fingers gripping yours, the touch tethering you to this hunk of red rock spiraling through space for just a few minutes more. “With her fork. But you’re gonna be okay.”

“Oh.” It’s not even a good lie on her part, but you can’t find it in you to snark about it. The world is starting to slide out of focus again, the ground beneath you flickering in and out of stability You feel transient; Roxy's grip is perhaps the only thing tying you down, and even that's starting to lose its hold. Somewhere very far away, perhaps in another Rose on another planet dying of another hole in her stomach, your wound hurts. Distantly, removed, but burning all the same. Focusing on it takes too much effort, though, so you allow yourself to ignore it, focusing on unconsciousness starting to lap at the sides of your vision and Roxy's nails biting into your knuckles. “That’s nice.” You cough again, and Roxy’s grip on your hand tightens like a vice, like she can somehow pull you back from the edge you’re slipping off.

“Maybe you—” You hear her swallow, hear her voice shake, hear guilt slice through her words like a sword. Like a sword, like a sickle, like a chainsaw. The world seems to crash down on you, inexplicably. You get the oddest sensation that you’re falling through yourself, down into something thick and impenetrable that really makes you want to just close your eyes, and for some reason the only face you can think of boasts black lipstick. “—shouldn’t try to talk now.” Roxy says, still speaking, still holding onto you. Like there’s something to save. Like there’s something worth saving.

“You saved me, didn’t you?” you say aloud, just to confirm. Roxy says nothing, face twisting up, and you take her silence as an invitation to keep speaking. There’s something— _god_ , your head hurts, everything feels out of focus—there’s something you need to do, say, say aloud. “Thanks,” you mumble. Blood in your mouth. Black lipstick. The world exploding into red and blue. “But—she’s gone, isn’t she. For good, I mean.”

Not a question. Not something you want answered, confirmed; you know, though, you have always known how this one ends. You on a rock, blood all over your chest. Her gone with nothing left to bury.

Roxy makes a questioning noise in the back of her throat, thumb dragging over your knuckles. The motion is so soft, so gentle compared to all the blood and exploding planets and dead friends from LOFAF; the backs of your eyes start to burn. “I saw her die,” you whisper. Black lipstick. Black hair. Blackness at the edges of your vision. It all ends the same. “And—it’s a shame how—” You cough. The world fragments just a little more. Roxy is a blur of blue. Blue and white. Blue and red. The end of the world was much faster than you thought it would be. Not even a body to cry over after. “—a shame that I never even—got to tell her I loved her.”

Your voice cracks at the end. You think of the meteor, of knitting, of her dresses, of feeling her hands grace your hips as she adjusts the seam of another dress you're modeling for. You think of the taste of a martini and broken glass and her face alight with some sort of desperate anger you hadn't understood. You think of waking in the dark, panic working its way through your chest, to feel her hands on your face, brushing away tears you hadn't know you were shedding, her voice a low, constant murmur that lets you slip back into a peaceful sleep. You think of reading aloud to her while she dozed in the sun. You think of teaching her to dance, swaying side to side, compelled by a rhythm no one could hear but the two of you. You think about her smile, her eyes, her laugh. You think about her life. You think about the scorch stain on the ground.

Doesn’t matter. Nothing to cry over now.

“Who?” Roxy’s voice is laced with desperation now. She’s panicking, she’s grieving, she’s guilt-ridden. She’s going to die too, probably. That’s how this story ends.

“Kanaya,” you mumble to the sky. Her name feels heavy in your mouth, sinking through the earth, pulling you down. It feels forbidden, oddly, like just it passing through your mouth damages its sanctity. Which it does, you supposed; you are the reason she's dead, the reason everyone is dead. You have no right to even speak of her, but you're tired and you're dying and you can't find it within yourself to even care. There’s blood on your lips now, broken glass studding the back of your throat, Kanaya’s final moments playing in some addled corner of your brain like a broken VHS tape.

“But...” You swallow again, because this pat is important. Even if it won’t matter. “You too, mom. You—too.”

Black hair. Black lipstick. Alchemized alcohol. Three years of trying, of preparing, of researching, of talking to gods and monsters and the dead, of fighting, of planning a life after this all, a life with her, and you still failed. Funny how this works.

Darkness claws at your vision again, and this time you don’t bother fighting it.


End file.
